THIRD PERSON POV)
Year 107AC
The wind that howled about the Red Keep that night was a banshee, clawing at the thick walls of Maegor's Holdfast as if seeking entry. It was a fitting chorus to the screams tearing from Queen Alicent's throat.
Within the royal bedchamber, the air hung heavy and gravid with the scent of sweat, blood, and burning herbs, a miasma she had come to know as the perfume of her duty. This was her second confinement, her second crucible in service to the king and her house.
The first had produced Aegon, a golden-haired boy who was, in the eyes of many and most certainly in her own, the realm's true heir. Now, as another torment seized her, twisting her body upon the birthing bed, she prayed to the Mother Above for another son. Another stone for the fortress she was building around her children, another rampart against the inevitable siege from her step-daughter.
King Viserys, First of His Name, stood a world away by the hearth, a study in impotence and dread. The firelight danced across the lines of worry etched deep into his face. He loved Alicent, his sweet, dutiful queen, but this chamber was haunted. Aemma's ghost was in the flicker of every shadow, her final, agonized cries a phantom echo beneath Alicent's own.
He turned a ring on his finger, over and over, the cold gold a poor anchor in the storm of memory.
"The gods are monstrously cruel to women" he whispered to the Grand Maester Mellos, his voice thin and reedy.
"And the Mother grants them a strength unknown to men, Your Grace," the maester returned, his tone as dry as old parchment.
A final, guttural scream ripped from Alicent, a sound that seemed to cleave the very air, and then, silence. A dreadful, heart-stopping void, broken a moment later by the thin, furious wail of a newborn babe.
"It is a prince!" the midwife declared, her voice trembling with relief. "A prince, Your Grace! Strong and hale!"
As the child cried, so too did the world outside. But it was not the wind. It was a sound not heard in King's Landing for more than a decade, a sound of myth and terror. From the cavernous darkness of the Dragonpit atop Rhaenys's Hill, a roar erupted.
It was not the call of a lesser dragon, but a deep, tectonic groan that vibrated through the very bedrock of the city. It shattered windows in Flea Bottom, sent horses bolting in the streets, and caused the great bells of the Starry Sept to shudder in their cradles.
In the Dragonpit, the Keepers who had long presided over the Black Dread's slow, quiet decay were thrown from their feet.
Balerion, the last living relic of the Conquest, who had grown too large for the sky and too weary for the world, was dying.
His scales were dull as soot, his breath a shallow rasp, his one good eye clouded with the mists of impending death.
But as the prince was born, that eye snapped open, a forge-fire of molten gold. The ancient neck, thick as a weirwood trunk, arched, and from the black abyss of his throat came the roar that shook the world.
A tremor ran through the colossal body, not a death throe, but a surge. The heat of him, which had been fading to a dull warmth, now radiated through the pit like a furnace blast. The Black Dread was not dying. He was waking.
Unaware of the miracle or terror he had wrought, the babe was cleaned and wrapped in the red-and-black silks of his House.
Alicent, limp with exhaustion, took him into her arms.
He was a quiet thing now, his cries spent. A fuzz of pure silver hair crowned his head, and when he opened his eyes, they were not the placid blue of a newborn, but a deep and startling golden, already focused, already ancient.
Viserys, his face ashen, stumbled towards the bed.
The maester had rushed to the window, babbling about the roar from the pit. But the King had eyes only for the child.
He saw the hair, so like his own father's, and the eyes that held the colour of sparkling dwan. And he knew. The septons had whispered it,
the prophets had dreamed it: a birth that would renew the fire.
"Rhaegar" Viserys breathed.